It’s no surprise the British electorate continues to be disinterested by political discourse. Today the BBC chose to make front-page news from a vacuous and banal discussion comparing the relative merits of the print design of the Labour and Conservative manifestos.
Sanjay Patel is a storyboard artist and animator for PIXAR animation…his Little India illustrations at ghee happy are wicked-cute, cartoon renderings of the gods of Hindu mythology – Ganesa, Brahma, Durga, Shiva, Hanuman, Matsya, Kali, Vishnu, Rama, Narasimha, Krishna, Pareshsuarama, Varaha & Lakshmi.
If you’re Hindu, you’ll either find them blasphemously offensive or really cute…
In the last few days MSN has been gradually rolling out upgrades for its MSN Messenger service; though a public betas has been running for some time, the final release includes a number of features not available during the beta phase.
Like recent releases of AIM and Yahoo! Messenger. much of the enhancement seems to be juvenile and cosmetic (winks, nudges, emoticons), though there are a handful of interesting new social features:
The Personal Message feature builds on the trend of users using their screenname to indicate some information about their status not covered by the standard Online/Away/Busy.
The What I’m Listening To variant of the Personal Message displays the music a user is currently listening to – curiously, Microsoft has recognised the dominance of iTunes and draws information from both iTunes and its own Windows Media Player, though the message is hyperlinked to MSN Music.
A user’s buddy-list icon is now enriched with thumbnail images, notification of new content information, their new photos at MSN Photos and any new posts at their MSN Spaces blog…in a lightweight stealthy imitation of richer RSS newsreaders.
Finally, building on the pioneering work of ActiveBuddy’s SmarterChild agent, the message window now allows users to initiate shared searches with their buddies, invoking search results in both user’s message windows and allowing a click through to richer results from MSN Search.
Though on the surface, such enhancements appear useful and fun, IM innovation seems to have stalled within infantile trinkets and the subtle imprisonment of users within a group of services from a single provider – in this case MSN, but AOL and Yahoo have exhibited similar behavior. What Microsoft has subtlety done is reverse the rulings that led to the inclusion of the Set Program Access & Defaults in Windows XP SP1.
This points to a larger question in the overall development of IM – where prior criticisms have been directed at the lack of interoperability, the current closed nature of development is, in my opinion, holding back useful innovations around instant messaging.
No major IM network – AOL, MSN or Yahoo – offer the ability for third parties to develop interesting and innovative applications that extend the features prescribed by the major networks. Consequently, the progress of IM development is locked into inane features that do not, for example, build on the potential of rich presence management.
What if I want …
Currently, there is no mechanism, technical or legal, to enable such remixing of the emerging IM experience…either due to protectionist measures by network owners or a myopic view of innovation in an open-source culture.
Telcos have long practiced closed models of innovation and seen their businesses hemorrhage into the hands of upstarts like Skype…whereas those who embrace open developers programmes – Flickr, Google, eBay, Amazon – have experienced innovations that extend their platform businesses and drive growth.
When IM operators understand that they’re most valuable as platform businesses, we can expect to see real innovation as the developer community applies itself to solving real problems and fulfilling a multitude of user needs, rather than infantilised feature sets.
UPDATE: AOL today announced that third parties will be able to attain partners status to develop solutions that run on top of AIM, ICQ, Netscape and iChat…albeit for enterprises – still, its a step in the right direction.
Last week, Bloglines took another step towards transforming the RSS newsreader into a universal inbox with the introduction of its Package Tracking feature – presenting users with the ability to track their UPS package deliveries through notification events from within Bloglines.
By sheer coincidence, I
‘d just ordered a Timbuk2 Detour messenger bag from eBags and was able to try the new feature, tracking my purchase through Umkirch, Frankfurt, Barking and Dewsbury. If you’d like to see this for yourself, simply visit my public profile and click the link for UPS Tracking Feed for M1561935154 in the left-hand pane. I’m sure Amazon will follow suit with an order tracking feature.
Services such as Audioscrobbler, Flickr, Buttress and del.icio.us have demonstrated the versatility of RSS as a general purpose notification medium, not simply for text but photos, TV, torrents, URLs and now eCommerce…delivering on the promise of 3rd party notification services explored tentatively by IM operators such as MSN.
However, Bloglines’ Package Tracking does underline some of the limitations of RSS. Essentially, designed as a syndication mechanism, RSS is being stretched into application areas that necessitate some form of digital identity and privacy capabilities…subscribing to the UPS feed did not require authentication, hence exposing a potentially private event into the public sphere…if my Hotmail account was leaving an RSS trail, it would be personally very useful in terms of integration with my newsreader, but disastrous for my privacy.
Despite these limitations, which will be resolved in time, RSS has delivered on the vision for web services, offering lightweight interoperability between previously disconnected islands of data.
ETech 2005 just drew to a close with Mark Fletcher’s garage guide to starting up web companies.
In the course of the last week, the France Telecom team has posted close to 70 articles tracking developments throughout the course of the week – from individual tutorials to keynotes and sessions.
Most of the content is currently is draft mode – over the course of the next few days, you’ll begin to see the articles trickle out with our account.
Mark Fletcher, founder of both Bloglines (just acquired by Ask Jeeves) and ONElist (now Yahoo Groups), presented a fascinating talk on what it takes to launch a startup in the online services market – notably how to design and build systems for reliability and scale and on budget. Fletcher’s talk was actually a useful compliment to Marc Hedlund’s earlier session on VC Funding for Geeks. Fletcher outlined a ‘garage philosophy’ for creating startups, consisting of a number of core principles:
Fletcher characterised registration-based websites as having two core infrastructures: front-end web servers and mail services (anything that talks directly to a user) and back-end systems for user data, other databases and storage. Software recommendations included:
In terms of hardware choices, Fletcher recommends:
To illustrate architectural choices, Fletcher actually cited some of the design decisions made in the development of Bloglines:
In deciding upon storage options, Fletcher contrasts relational databases with file-based storage and notably the use of RAID storage or redundant servers. ONElist utilised arrays of RAID drives to provide a storage infrastructure, where Bloglines utilises a software RAID-1 infrastructure based on Linux.
In administering systems, Fletcher doesn’t give too much detail, but recommends:
Finally, Fletcher urged entrepreneurs and innovators to avoid making stupid bets citing a bet to shave his head if ONElist was ever sold!
Lee Felsenstein‘s session on what he terms fair trade technology and technology that helps the world had shamefully low attendance given the subject matter. Indeed this was unusual given the ordinarily optimistic and near-utopian vibe of ETech, however the poor attendance may be due in part to poor schduling at the close of the conference when many delegates are leaving the venue.
Nevertheless, Felsenstein’s session was a great introduction to the altruistic work of the Fonly Institute and their work in the Third World. Felsenstein opened by profiling Phon Kom, a community in Laos that is unable to feed itself reliably, yet high social cohesion has enabled themselves to raise taxes, improve schooling, relocate from the Plain of Jars and improve employment prospects. However, Phon Kom’s rural economy s struggling against the forces of globalisation as free-trade agreements and markups by middlemen and retailers in the developed world are not passed to the villagers, who are becoming increasingly disconnected from their traditional culture, buffeted by crime and political instability.
Phon Kom expatriates led a former US serviceman and the Jhai Foundation to understand what could help the villagers compete in a global market place.
Felsenstein draws an interesting parallel between Free Trade and Fair Trade; where the former applys the rule of the strongest with no regard to non-economic consequences, agricultural issues, the latter takes human interactions into account, promoting a sustainable agricultural market where the farmer is a participant in the market economy, not simply accepting of given prices. This requires that farmers have access to market information.
Felsenstein went on to articulate some principles for Fair Trade Technologies:
Felsenstein describes the increasing marginalisation of rural communities across the globe as an gradually destabilising factor for modern society. Historically, as human agriculture created food surplusses, cities became possible and indeed became cultural commons as rural communities become increasingly culturally marginalised despite feeding urban centres. As culture begins migrating to electronic media, rural people can potentially find some equity.
In the village of El Limon, within the Dominican Republic, there are 20-100 homes suffering endemic poverty, with no telecommunications and very limited electricity and road networks. However, the village has line-of-sight to a small town with a population of 100’000 equipped with DSL access. In 1998, Fonly constructed a wireless link between the town and El Limon.
Like Phon Kom, the residents of El Limon have high social cohesion and taking responsibility for their own future, are collaborating to effect social change, notably by articulating their requirements for telecommunication:
Felsenstein described this cohesion and the fulfillment of these needs as cultural justice and also that the most important lessons learned in equipping rural communities are to build on existing technologies and social structures and listening to the needs of the community.
In the region around El Limon, Fonly has helped build out an infrastructure using lower power PCs, generic wifi and inter-village VoIP and PSTN services for El Limon, Los Martinez, Los Ranchos and Las Caobas – serving a population of around 1000 rural residents.
Though successful, the infrastructure does require a technical and financial support base, self-configuring networks, a prepay phone system (perhaps based on Asterisk) and of course more computers. More generally, Felsenstein’s loose system requirements for rural services to date are:
The Jhai Foundation’s reference plaform, as used in Phon Kom, consists of 802.11b networks that link villages, data and VoIP services to the internet and links to the PSTN with OpenH323, POTS calls and PABX functionality.
Felsenstein sees expatatriate disporas as crucial to distribution as they can aggregate the cost of the village system, they know the culture, the village and the players, they are willing to maintain contact and can provide commercial opportunities.
The prospects for Fonly and Felsenstein’s work are promising, with a potential market of 100s of millions, if not billions, of customers – if costs can be kept low. There is an industry in formation around rural telecommunication, based on open source software and commodity hardware that could provide many global benefits, including direct economic benefits to participants on all sides.
For Wanadoo’s TR team, it may represent an opportunity to apply the research from Project Mosaic, a low cost domestic computing+communication appliance, to a economically and socially just cause.
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You can download the full text of Felsenstein’s speech here…
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ETech is a perrennial nexus of Powerbooks and iBooks – firing up iTunes and seeing how many users have enabled the Share My Music option much music is being shared over the local wifi network is always a novelty.
In this screenshot you can see the music collections of the EFF’s Cory Doctorow and the BBC’s Matt Webb.
